So when recording electric guitar bass while you can directly into a computer,
it's best to be able to monitor outside of the computer.
And that's where an amplifier can really come in handy.
So instead of plugging directly into the interface, we can use an amplifier so we
can hear the sound. in the room, and then go from that into
our interface. Now there is a couple ways we can
accomplish this. And I want to go through a variety of
ways. The first way would be to plug the bass
or guitar into your amplifier and put a microphone in front of the amplifier, and
record that into your interface. And that's a very common way to record,
and it really is a great option. the benefits of that is you'll get the
sound of the amp. And really, the amp makes up an integral
part of the sound of any electric or electric guitar bass performance.
You never really hear the sound of the bass without the amp, you know?
It's just part of the sound. So recording with a microphone makes a
lot of sense. The down side of that is that you'll get
the sound of your room in there. Remember every time you're recording with
the microphone you're recording the signal.
But also recording the room it's in. So if you're not in a acoustically
perfect room, then you might not want to put a mic in front of your amplifier.
Also, having a mic in a room does . .
... It makes it, recording a bit harder
because of the chance of feedback with your monitors.
There's the chance of just noise and moving around you hear.
So it's nice to be able to record direct. And by direct, I mean plugged directly
into your system your interface or to a DI box or right into your amplifier and
using a line-out. So you'll find many amplifiers allow you
to plug into the amplifier and on the back have a line-out.
And let's look at how that would work. Again, when you're disconnecting your
gear, you want to make sure that you turn the input gain all the way down.
And probably you'll want to turn off your speakers as well.
So I'll turn the input in down on my interface all the way and I'll disconnect
my bass. So, we can plug our bass guitar into our
amplifier and because it is an amp designed for bass guitar it's always
going to work with an instrument input, right.
It's not designed for a line input. This amplifier on the back, has a variety
of quarter inch connectors. And we want to make sure we use the right
one. there is one that says line out, and
that's the one you have to use. There are another two on the back of this
one that say speaker out. And it's essential that you never hook a
speaker output to any line in any of your gear.
The speaker out are very, very high levels.
They're designed to be hooked directly to a speaker and give you all that volume,
so you really don't want to connect those to a line input.
So I'm going to take the line out from my amplifier and plug it into my interface
and this is using a standard quarter inch instrument cable, a TS cable line out
from the amplifier into the interface. And like usual, we use the same exact
procedure. I'd already turned the input gain all the
way down and now I can increase that gain and set my levels as usual.
The benefit of this, is that when I play through my amplifier, I will hear it in
real-time, right out of the amplifier, without any latency.
And I'll get a nice solid signal going into the computer.
The other benefit of this is I'm using the pre-amp that's built in to the
amplifier here, and this pre-amp, in any amplifier.
Colors the signal a bit, so it might not sound exactly like an amplifier does,
when you hear it through the speaker amp, but it does get some of that character.
You get some of the distortion in a guitar amp and you get some of that nice
compression that you get using a base amp like this, so that's a really good option
if your amplifier does have a line out. Now, not all amplifiers have a line out.
And there's one more option that works really well and that's to utilize a
direct box. And let's see how we would do that.
The first thing I'll do now is just kind of disconnect what I have, I'll turn the
input gain on my interface all the way down and disconnect that.
[SOUND] And then I'm going to disconnect my, my guitar from my amplifier here, as
well. Again, just like we did with our
interface, I want to make sure the input gain on my amp is all the way down to
prevent clicks and pops from coming out of the amplifier.
You're getting the idea of this, right? Always turn the gain all the way down,
then disconnect and connect things, then turn the gain up.
kind of makes sense, right? Avoid those clicks and pops.
So, a direct box, like we saw before, provides us a way to go from quarter inch
to XLR. And another thing that it does that's
really important is it matches the impedance of a guitar or bass, and allows
it to be plugged into a line in. The level will still be very low, but it,
it gets that impedance correct. Which is that what they're really saying
with the instrument in or the direct in. If we look at a direct box we're going to
see that it has two quarter inch jacks and one XLR jack.
We'll take the output of the guitar directly into the direct box to one of
those quarter inch inputs. I can then take the XLR out and go to my
interface. Now, because this is coming from a bass,
the level will probably be quite low. And you'll have to use a little bit more
gain than maybe with a microphone on your interface.
But if you have a bass or guitar with active pick ups, it could be quite high.
The level setting procedure will be the same as with a microphone.
Now, we could just record like this. And the benefits of this also, if I'm not
even use the amp at all, is I can use a short quarter inch cable.
Say, very close to me. And if I have to go a long distance to
the studio. I can use the long XLR cable.
So we'll have that reduced noise, that I'm using a balanced cable for a long
run, which is excellent. So even just this has some benefits.
But since I do have that parallel output, that secondary quarter inch cable.
I can go from there into my amplifier. And then I can hear, out of the amp in
real-time, the direct box is being plugged into my interface.
I can set the gain as usual, and I'm ready to record my guitar or base.
This method really is preferred, you're going to get a very clean signal from
your guitar bass, and if you want to go the step further, many people would
actually put a microphone in front of this and get both signals and be able to
use both and choose between them later in their DAW.